Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will
address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress during his visit to Washington
next month. He also is headline speaker for the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee/AIPAC’s Annual Conference.
Other confirmed speakers include:

John Boehner (R-OH) Speaker of
the House, U.S. House of Representatives

Harry Reid (D-NV) Majority
Leader, U.S. Senate

Robert Casey (D-PA) U.S. Senate

John Thune (R-SD) U.S. Senate

Eric Cantor (R-VA) Majority
Leader, U.S. House of Representatives

Steny Hoyer (D-MD) Democratic
Whip, U.S. House of Representatives

Jim Woolsey Former Director,
Central Intelligence Agency

Martin Indyk Vice President for
Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution; Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel

Dan Senor Adjunct Senior Fellow
for Middle East Studies, Council on Foreign Relations

“AIPAC’s unrelenting support for the illegal
policies of the Israeli government—separation walls, settlements, the siege
of Gaza—in addition to its bellicose policies across the region, especially
Iran, has been devastating for Palestinians and the Middle East, including
Israel. It also harms our reputation around the world and squanders $3
billion a year subsidizing the powerful Israeli military when we need that
money to rebuild the United States.

A Few Facts:

#1:
Between the years 1949 and 2010, the United States granted $61.3 billion in
military aid to Israel.

#2:
A whopping $30 billion in U.S. military aid has been promised to Israel for
the years 2009 to 2018.

#3:
Approximately 500,000 Israeli settlers live within the occupied Palestinian
territory in violation of international law.

#4: There are approximately four million
Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem, the West
Bank, and Gaza, according to 2007 census figures compiled by the Palestinian
Central Bureau of Statistics and reported in Ha’aretz.

#5:
Between September 29, 2000 and August 31, 2010, 1,084 Israelis were killed
by Palestinians, including 124 minors. During the same period, 6,408
Palestinians were killed by Israelis, including 1,315 minors. These
statistics, reported by B’Tselem Israeli Information Center for Human Rights
in the Occupied Territories, reflect the extreme disparity in the capacity
of the two parties to inflict trauma, loss, and death through acts of
violence. Israel’s military dominance is largely a result of U.S. largesse
through military aid, as well as access to sophisticated U.S.-designed
military technology.

#6: Weapons purchased by Israel using U.S.
military aid are used against civilians in violation of U.S. laws.” [1]

Further Background:

“Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public
Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage
Scandal” exposes how US Middle East policy has been formulated and thrives
due to the dearth of relevant reporting on AIPAC's activities.

Author Grant F. Smith begins with Senator
Fulbright's on target questions to Jewish-Agency-funded US foreign agents
who did not register with the Justice Department or disclose their true
financing, funding flows and covert activities and illuminates how AIPAC:
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee operates "within a murky nexus
regulated by four important but seldom enforced US laws." [2]

The lax enforcement of The Logan Act, The Foreign
Agents Registration Act/FARA, the 1917 Espionage Act, Thompson Memorandum
guidelines for prosecuting corporate crime coupled with the fear of being
labeled anti-Semitic and a media who have failed at their commission to seek
and report the truth have all colluded to exert an undue influence over
Congress and thus; we the people of America to be "under the de facto
influence of a powerful foreign interest." [Ibid]

Smith documents how
AIPAC-a constellation of individuals and organizations that make up the
"Israel lobby" continue to actively steer USA foreign policy in a militant
and pro-Israel only direction.

Senator Fulbright's concerns over
activities of unregistered foreign agents who worked to influence public
opinion and policy resulted in the 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee
hearings to investigate the Jewish Agency and uncovered the "conduit"
operation run by the American Zionist Council. In 1959, The American Zionist
Council was renamed AIPAC.

Within eight years, the Council received
over a half a million "from the Jewish Agency to create a favorable opinion
in this country for Israeli government policies. The Senate investigation
closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go
on…[and] by 1998, "US aid to Israel exceeded $3 billion a year, the highest
amount of US aid given to any country." [3]

"AIPAC's illegal tactics
harm America…[and] corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than
all street crime combined…Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer estimated the
total cost of [the] prolonged conflict in the Middle East at $3 trillion [in
2002 USA dollars and he] lays a good deal of the blame for this at the
doorstep of AIPAC." [4]

Smith also illuminates how money laundering of
over 50 billion US dollars to "charitable" organizations and massive covert
activities has enabled the ongoing building of the illegal apartheid Israeli
settlements which have expropriated legally owned Palestinian land. Today, a
quarter of a million Jewish settlers, most all of which have no historical
tie to the Holy Land, have created facts on the ground to disable a viable
contiguous Palestinian state.

Every American politician is aware of
Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons development, stockpile, and launch
capabilities, but due to the influence of AIPAC "it is business as usual in
Washington: criminal wrongdoing continues to corrupt America's core values,
rule of law, and Middle East policy, as the Israel lobby's cross-hairs shift
almost completely to Iran." [5]

In 1976, the Symington Amendment was
adopted to fortify and extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It
prohibited US assistance to any country trafficking in nuclear enrichment
equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.

The
world learned about Israel's secret underground nuclear weapons facility in
1986 due to Mordechai Vanunu's photographic evidence, but the American
government ignores this elephant in the world and has refused to insist
Israel allow international inspection of their nuclear facilities which are
older than Japan’s reactors and share the same technology.

Beginning
in the 1990's and even more so after 9/11, US politicians blind allegiance
to Israel has been furthered by the claim that both states are threatened by
Arab terrorist groups and rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass
destruction.

Many Americans see Israel as an ally and Iran and Syria
as our mutual enemies. The "war on terror" has become a tactic to infuse
fear while it ignores that much of the anger in the Arab world is in
response to Israel's 40+ years of military occupation of Palestine and the
concrete wall and electrified fence built on legally owned Palestinian
property which is "financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per
mile. The Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and
emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers
from their olive groves which have been their families' sole livelihood for
generations." [6]

William Fulbright warned, "The age of warrior
kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a
different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment,
tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world
peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon
which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense,
of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding
between cultures."

Yet, America's 'leaders' continue to cower
and pander to an "illegal foreign lobby that has long flouted US law and
suborned the national interest as a foreign agent." [7]

On George Washington's birth date, his Farewell
Address has been read aloud in Congress ever since 1896:

"Observe good faith and justice towards all
nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments
for others should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable
feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards
another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a
slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety
of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an
imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and
infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former in the
quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate justification."